Cloud computing is rapidly changing the Internet into a collection of clouds, which provide a variety of computing resources, storage resources, and, in the future, a variety of resources that are currently unimagined.
As the industry moves email workloads to the cloud, which were once housed locally within the enterprise, the security of the enterprise is being compromised, because private information moves outside the control of the company. One of the main concerns when moving to Software as a Service (SaaS) application within the cloud is “data leakage.” Furthermore, the complexity of management increases along with the ability to secure the privacy of email.
The security problem is created because an in-house administrator no longer has control of email messages that are stored in the cloud. Control is delegated to a cloud vendor, who may have many customers and may even mix customers email data within a single store. Such a situation limits the controls that a company administrator can have of the company email messages. So, it is no longer possible to control which employees are to be trusted with confidential data in the companies email messages. The location of the email data stores may not even be known by the company administrator; notwithstanding what other companies are using the same store for their email or what level of security is used to safe guard the data. The situation makes it very difficult to prevent “data leakage” from the corporate/enterprise email system.
This problem has already occurred with the U.S. government Google email accounts, which were hacked and which had large data leakage. Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, has already had to make public statements admitting that there had been data lost from the email cloud used by government workers. These problems impair cloud acceptance and those companies that use cloud-based services. Cost will continue to drive companies to the cloud, but companies need keep the same level of security and control that they had when the data was controlled on their premises; particularly for sensitive data, such as emails.